Velcroman1 writes: It’s a holiday present from Microsoft — the gift of language. The Windows giant has added support for the Cherokee language into Windows 8, more than 20 years after Tracy Monteith, a Cherokee from North Carolina who worked for Microsoft, asked his employers to make the settings, pull-down menus and error messages speak his language. "Microsoft will not make millions off this project, but they will help keep our language alive," said Cherokee principal chief Bill John Baker. It marks the first time that a Native American language has been “fully integrated” into the operating system.

If Microsoft stored language-specific data in files that customers could easily edit, we could get Klingon, Pig-Latin, and other translations from the user community. "Real" translations from actual but non-economical-to-translate languages would also become practical with help from the user community.

For obvious safety reasons (read: This could be an exploit for malware-driven social engineering attacks) language files not signed my Microsoft wouldn't work except in a "testing" scenario. MS has already taken this "signed-files-only unless you are testing" approach with 64-bit device drivers, so this wouldn't be hard.